pppoe-connect is a shell script which manages a PPPoE connection using the Roaring Penguin user-space PPPoE client. If you omit config_file, the default file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp0 is used. If you supply interface and user, then they override the Ethernet interface and user-name settings in the configuration file.

Note that normally, you should not invoke pppoe-connect directly. Instead, use pppoe-start to bring up the PPPoE connection.

pppoe-connect first reads a configuration file. It then brings up a PPPoE connection. If the connection ever drops, a message is logged to syslog, and pppoe-connect re-establishes the connection. In addition, each time the connection is dropped or cannot be established, pppoe-connect executes the script /etc/ppp/pppoe-lost if it exists and is executable.

The shell script pppoe-stop causes pppoe-connect to break out of its loop, bring the connection down, and exit.

A file in which to write the process-ID of the pppoe-connect process (for example, /var/run/pppoe.pid). Two additional files ($PIDFILE.pppd and $PIDFILE.pppoe) hold the process-ID's of the pppd and pppoe processes, respectively.

By using different configuration files with different PIDFILE settings, you can manage multiple PPPoE connections. Just specify the configuration file as an argument to pppoe-start and pppoe-stop.